I remember once when I was hanging around the motel office as a kid, Bev told me about the time her daddy took her up to the top of Big Jack. She said you could see miles and miles in every direction, the whole county laid out like a patchwork quilt. Her face was soft and handsome for a minute, remembering, before she told me to go get the Windex and a roll of paper towels if I didn’t have anything better to do.
E. Starling’s name is linked only once, in the “Notable people” section.
Her page has a little exclamation point at the top advising readers that the article needs additional citations for verification. I read it with something strange and electric running through me, an itch I can’t explain.
I open an empty document and the cursor blinks at me, an invitation in Morse code. I haven’t written anything except résumés and forgeries in eight years—because Jasper deserves more than make-believe, and because even the Lost Boys had to grow up in the end—but tonight I’m tempted. Maybe it’s the memory of Starling House, vast and ruinous against the winter sky. Maybe it’s the bare facts of E. Starling’s life, a dissatisfying arc that could be fixed in fiction. Maybe it’s the damn dreams.
In the end I only permit myself to copy and paste the Wiki page into the document, telling myself it’s research, before shutting the laptop so firmly that Jasper stirs in his sleep.
E. Starling （author）
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Eleanor Starling （1851–4 May 1886） was a nineteenth-century American children’s author and illustrator who published under the name of E. Starling. Though initially poorly received, her picture book The Underland enjoyed a twentieth-century revival and is now frequently included in lists of America’s most influential children’s literature.
Biography [edit]
There is no record of Eleanor Starling’s birth.[1] Her first appearance in the historical record is the announcement of her engagement to John Peabody Gravely, founder and co-owner of Gravely Bros. Coal & Power Co. （now Gravely Power）。[2] The two were married in 1869, but John Gravely died shortly afterward, leaving the company to his surviving brother, Robert Gravely, and the fortune to his wife.
Starling, who never received formal training in art or literature, submitted the manuscript of The Underland to more than thirty publishers. Julius Donohue of Cox & Donohue recalled receiving a package containing twenty-six illustrations “so amateurish and upsetting” that he hid them in the bottom drawer of his desk and forgot them.[3] Several months later, when his six-year-old daughter begged for “the nightmare book” at bedtime, he realized the pages had been discovered.[3] Cox & Donohue offered Starling a modest contract and published The Underland in the spring of 1881.
Eleanor Starling never met with her editors or readers. She refused all interviews, and all correspondence addressed to her was returned unopened. She was declared dead in 1886. Her work was held in trust until it fell out of copyright in 1956. Her home in Muhlenberg County is marked by the Kentucky State Historical Society.
Critical Reception [edit]
The Underland was considered both a critical and commercial failure upon publication. A reviewer for the Boston Times described it as “deliberately unsettling” and “a transparent theft from Mr. Carroll,”[4] while the Christian Children’s Union petitioned several state governments to ban the book for the promotion of immorality. Donohue defended it in an open letter, asking how a book could be immoral when it contained no nudity, violence, sex, alcohol, or profanity. In response the Children’s Union cited the “horrific anatomy” of the Beasts of Underland and the “general aura of dread.”[5]
The book developed a quiet following over subsequent decades. By the early 1900s a number of artists and writers were citing E. Starling as an early influence.[6] Her artwork, initially dismissed as clumsy and untrained, was lauded for its stark composition and intensity of emotion. Her sparsely told tale, which described a little girl named Nora Lee who fell into “Underland,” was recognized for its engagement with themes of fear, isolation, and monstrosity.
Since then Underland has gained acclaim as an early work in the neo-Gothic and modernist movements, and is considered a cultural turning point when children’s literature abandoned the strict moral clarity of the nineteenth century for darker, more ambiguous themes.[6] Director Guillermo del Toro has praised E. Starling’s work, and thanked her for teaching him that “the purpose of fantasy is not to make the world prettier, but to lay it bare.”[7]